So when DaClyde offered to share his collection of 30,000 images with Zistle as long as he didn’t have to add them individually – we were ecstatic but also knew that we needed a way to solve this problem once and for all. With a little testing we were able to come up with a solution that has worked beautifully – thanks in part to DaClyde’s meticulous organizational skills. Literally some of our sets have gone from zero pictures to being 99% complete. Let’s just take a second to relish in the beauty of the 1987 Topps Set…

And all 53 pages of the main set look that way with a few exceptions. Wow! We feel extremely lucky to have such generous contributing members and we appreciate your patience while we come up with a solution for everyone. In the meantime if you have complete sets or a large collection that is well organized and would like to save yourself from getting carpel tunnel – please let us know. Ideally – the cards for any given subset would be in their own directory and the names of the cards would be the card number. However – we can most likely work with any organizational scheme.

Thanks for all of your hard work – we’re getting there.

This post is really meant to quell your fears as well as address some of the issues that are facing Zistle and how we plan to move forward in 2010. First of all, Zistle is not being shut down. We haven’t abandoned you or the site. What in fact has been going on behind the scenes is a long and involved conversation about how to take Zistle to the next level. Here are the major challenges that we are facing.

Larger capacity

If you are a member that has a large collection or wantlist on Zistle, you are no stranger to error codes. This is unacceptable to us but we frankly do not have the bandwidth to support it. The immediate fix to the problem is to pay for more bandwidth but this is not a real solution since this is a cycle that will just perpetually continue.

Zistle needs to stay free but have a path to sustainabilty

Our love for Zistle is deep but it is obvious that at some point Zistle will become a financial burden for us. We are committed to keeping Zistle free but it is also important that the site breaks even monetarily. This is our goal for 2010. We have ideas for how to make this possible and as always, we will be asking you for your feedback, thoughts and suggestions. Stay tuned.

More members

Zistle is only as good as the members of the site. We know that having more members is not only our  key to growth but also the only way to give our current members the best experience possible. Many of you have reached out with great ideas on how to increase membership and you will see us implementing some of them this year. In addition, we will be working harder to engage with the users that we do have to keep them excited about the site.

Better Data

While we have a great start and we have some rockstar members who have devoted so much of their time to add to the database, there are still major holes and we can’t expect you to fill them by hand. To tackle this issue, we plan to build more sophisticated tools for you to enter information and make it easier for us to edit and update changes on the back end.

More access

One issue for many of you has been the inability to export or print your information. While most of you trust us, we also understand that it is frustrating to not be able to access your data the way you want. This is an issue that we will be tackling head on. We appreciate your patience in waiting for this feature.

After reading all of that, these challenges might seem obvious and you might even ask yourself why I would take the time to write all of this down and make you read it. While the challenges are obvious the solution is not and this is what we have been struggling with for the last six months. We have decided that to face these challenges and reach our goals for the site that we will need to actually rebuild the site in a different platform. It may sound scary but Josh has convinced me that this is not only the best course of action but the fastest as well. Please don’t be scared by the proposition. Your data will be safe and Zistle will be better when it is completed. We are confident that this will allow us to not only implement many of the features that you have been asking for but also make Zistle a faster, easier to use site. If you made it this far in the post – thanks for taking the time to be a part of Zistle. 2010 is going to be a great year.

Also, there have been many excellent ideas shared through the feedback tool. If you haven’t checked out what people are saying, it might be a good time to peruse the ideas and let us know your thoughts. It can be hard to justify adding a feature if only one person is asking for it. Even just indicating which ideas you really like can be extremely helpful for us in determining the next feature to add. Keep telling us what you think. We are listening!